Salsa is a year-round proposition: The jarred stuff is always available, as are refrigerated versions. Making your own is an option, if you don't mind out-of-season tomatoes. But some of us would rather wait.

We resist temptation until the days lengthen and the produce improves. We hold off until we can enjoy salsa and chips on a balmy spring night on the back terrace.

Really, Cinco de Mayo should kick off salsa season. So when Karen from San Jose asked for new salsa recipes and mentioned her fondness for mangoes, several Plates readers offered their favorites.

I particularly like that these recipes do not rely on tomatoes to carry the flavor. At my house, our garden doesn't yield flavorful tomatoes until well into July, and even I can't wait that long for salsa. Tomatoes play a supporting role in two of the salsa recipes accompanying today's column, and one recipe doesn't include them at all.

Barbara Baksa, of Fremont, sent a fig salsa recipe that also works well as an accompaniment to chicken, pork or lamb. The salsa includes diced figs, tomatoes and mangoes. It's nicely balanced, with chopped mint, garlic, lime juice and balsamic vinegar.

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Plates regular Stephanie Zervas, of Millbrae, began clipping fruit salsa recipes after her sister-in-law raved about the mango-pineapple salsa at San Francisco's Cliff House several years ago. She found a black bean-mango salsa from Sunset magazine. The recipe calls for both yellow and orange bell peppers, but you can stick with one color, if you prefer. This salsa also works as a topping for grilled fish or as a side salad, according to the June 2001 Sunset article.

Leslie Rocha's "tried and true" mango salsa recipe calls for one large, finely chopped mango, but Rocha, of Danville, usually uses two or three to increase the fruitiness. Her simple salsa also includes red onion, cilantro, a poblano chile, honey and lime juice.

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If you have a copy of a 1970s cookbook called "The Cooks of Santa Clara County," Linda Prieto, of Moss Beach, needs your help. The cookbook included a favorite recipe for carrot-pineapple bundt cake, she says: "It was a wonderful, large bundt cake that kept for several days, very moist with crushed pineapple."

Prieto figures the cookbook didn't survive one of several moves. "It was so tattered from overuse, my spouse probably threw it out," she says. Prieto has tried to modify a conventional carrot-pineapple cake recipe without success. If you have either the recipe from the cookbook or another bundt cake version, please share.

Plates regular Debbie Westhafer-Schoonmaker remembers her mother making a rice dish that involved browning the rice in the oven, before adding water or broth and cooking it on the stove. "The house would smell like popcorn," she says. "I think it was from a potluck we had with the trailer club we belonged to."